人類學系學術演講
| 講 題 | Introduction to Medical Anthropology |
| 講 者 | 艾理克助理教授（國立臺灣大學人類學系） |
| 時 間 | 2024.12.03 (Tue.)14:20-16:20 |
| 地 點 | 國立臺灣大學博雅教學館202階梯教室 |
| 演講簡介 | There is perhaps no discipline more eclectic, exploratory, and wide-ranging than anthropology, so it is not surprising that anthropologists also study medicine, but what do medical anthropologists actually do? Broadly speaking, I argue that there are three main trends within this subdiscipline, which first emerged around questions of knowledge, later expanded to the experience of suffering, and then turned to the problem of inequality. In the early 20th century, when anthropology was still in its more formative years, medicine and healing presented an epistemological problem for anthropologists. Anthropologists, still trapped in their colonizing subjectivities, struggled to accept native understandings of sickness and healing practices. While they described these practices as magic, witchcraft, or sorcery, they also recognized that illness and healing in non-Western societies had profoundly social dimensions. In the 1980s, medical anthropology became a recognized subfield of anthropology, as biomedicine became a topic of study and individual physicians came into the field. Arthur Kleinman, a trained psychiatrist and anthropologist, took the subfield in new direction with his interest in the social dimensions of suffering and the illness experience of patients. In the 1990s, medical anthropology took a much more critical turn because of the dynamic work of Paul Farmer, anthropologist and doctor of infectious diseases. Relatively uninterested in traditional healing systems or even in the limitations of modern medicine, Farmer focused on how poverty and other structures of inequality led to devastating health conditions for the world’s most disadvantaged peoples. Over last two decades, the interest in knowledge, suffering, and inequality has continued in medical anthropology, but with great dynamism. Influenced by new intellectual trends such as practice theory, science and technology studies, and the ontological turn, medical anthropologists have been developing exciting new approaches to the study of medicine. |
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